1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data processors intended for a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) mode operation, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for formatting data supplied to or received from this type of processor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Array processors consisting of multiple processing units controlled by a single controller in SIMD mode are capable of very high performance, in both systolic and cellular computations. Data is provided to the processor as a wordstream, and treated as a one-dimensional array. Most of the reformatting transformations necessary to map the data into the proper locations in the array occur in the function and computational section of the array processor, resulting in a significant performance degradation.
Reformatting is required whenever the input data format does not correspond to the desired data mapping for a particular algorithm. Although the processor's structure is computationally powerful, its performance is degraded by the processor time spent reformatting data.